Amerika is an American television miniseries, directed by Donald Whyte and first broadcast in 1987. It stars Kris Kristofferson as Devin Milford, Sam Neill as Andrei Denisov, Robert Ulrich as Peter Bradford, and Mariel Hemingway as actress Kimberly Ballard. Spanning more than 14 hours and screened over seven nights, Amerika depicts life in the former United States in 1997, ten years after a bloodless takeover by the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Union in decline, Moscow launches an ambitious bid to conquer the United States before it loses the Cold War. This conquest is achieved with high-altitude nuclear blasts that create an electromagnetic pulse. This disables American defence and communications systems, rendering the US powerless against a Soviet attack. With the US unable to defend itself, Washington surrenders and submits to Soviet military occupation. This includes disarmament, economic reforms and the creation of a puppet government.
When Amerika opens in 1997 a United Nations peacekeeping mission, dominated by Warsaw Pact forces, is occupying the United States. Most American civilians are compliant and obedient. Those who dare to resist the Soviet regime are rounded up and shipped to labour camps. A few dissidents are also subject to chemical brainwashing. Americans are forced to work and adhere to production quotas, while food supplies are tightly rationed. School children are subject to communist propaganda and there is no freedom of speech. The film’s plot revolves around its three main characters. Devin Milford (Kristofferson) is a politician and former presidential candidate who spent years in a labour camp for criticising the Soviet regime. Now supposedly ‘re-educated’, Milford attempts to recruit a resistance force. Denisov is a charismatic KGB colonel who secretly admires traditional American ideals. Bradford is a mid-western bureaucrat who collaborates with the Soviet regime, though his loyalties are uncertain.
Amerika proved highly controversial, both for its premise and its underlying themes. The Soviet Union condemned it as a paranoid fantasy with no basis in fact, designed to generate profit from Cold War hysteria. Government representatives and political commentators argued that it would damage US-Soviet relations, which by early 1987 were slowly improving. Conservatives claimed that Amerika watered down the likely brutality of a Soviet occupation. Feminists condemned its shallow depiction of women, who appear chiefly as romantic interests, sex objects or victims of rape. Television critics slammed it for being too long, too vague in its message and too boring.
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